Reconsidering The Value of College

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on October 28

Here’s a thought one rarely hears in New York City and environs, where everyone thinks their child is gifted: College may be a big waste of money for a lot of kids. That case is made in America’s Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor’s Degree, a provocative article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education by career counselor Marty Nemko. Nemko lays out this cold hard fact right at the top:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education.

He’s talking about almost half of each year’s high school graduates. And since some 70% of seniors go on to college, there are likely a lot of kids who will find themselves struggling academically while piling up hefty tuition bills that future earnings may not justify.
Nemko goes on to argue that far too many colleges are selling their students a bill of goods, sticking undergrads in huge lecture halls while their top professors are off doing money-generating research. And many of these students should never have been admitted to college in the first place.

A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below “proficient” levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station…Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces.

Should these kids be urged to try vocational school? Perhaps, according to the essay More Machinists, Fewer Poets? on the always interesting website NewGeography, devoted to analyzing the places where we live and work. Author Matthew Leiphon notes that there are communities all around the country in dire need of skilled workers who don’t necessarily need a bachelor’s degree. According to a technical instructor in Austin, NM, which is facing a shortage of maintenance mechanics:

If we can’t get more [people] interested in two-year college educations and jobs that require a specialized skill like industrial maintenance mechanics or carpentry and electricians, we’re going be in a deep world of hurt in about five years when all these people retire and we can’t produce goods we need to produce.

Still, I’m not so sure that the bottom 40% should automatically be discouraged from attending college. I know of someone who was a pretty average student in high school, who spent most of her time rebelling against her parents and her town, but was saved by a guidance counselor who told her if she just hung on, graduated and went off to college she’d be OK. Thank goodness I listened to him. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I can’t begin to tell you the worlds it opened for me. I’m not saying I turned into a brilliant student, but I did turn into an engaged one. So I’m on the side of Salon writer Amy Benfer, who reacts to Nemko’s essay in Diploma With A Side of Fries:

As a parent who has spent plenty of time with wickedly smart teenagers who nevertheless struggled to get through high school, I am fiercely protective of the kids lurking in the bottom of the class. Let’s face it: The kids at the top of the class include the kids who follow the rules, the kids who go to college because, in their social class, that’s just what you do, a smattering of reckless geniuses and original thinkers, and a bunch of generally smart, motivated kids. In the bottom half, you’ll have the kids who don’t follow the rules, the kids who won’t go to college because in their class that’s just not what you do, a smattering of reckless geniuses and original thinkers who might find high school boring and bureaucratic, and a bunch of kids who genuinely would be much happier getting the hell away from academia and learning any number of trades. But to pretend one can discern those who “deserve” to go to college from those who do not by lopping a whole class of kids off at the center, to borrow a recent political metaphor, is like using a hatchet when what you really need is a scalpel.

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